Now that we've gotten actual snow, even those who didn't hate the site's background are probably pretty sick of it. So I set out to make an irritatingly clever replacement. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to make my idea work with the site, composition-wise, and the actual photos have some problems with shadows and the graffiti fading. I had to use the burn tool in photoshop to make it even this legible -- and you can't even see that I'm rocking out to the Dave Matthews Band! Oh well. Although it won't work with the design, our anonymous neighbor's suggestion would still be a great alternate blog title.

And while I'm at it, how about some more graffiti? I shouldn't encourage these idiots, but at least they're more imaginative than simple taggers...

This rings a bell. When Catherine and I started dating, one of the most confounding things I had to learn was that failing to say "bless you" after a sneeze is a clear indicator that you don't really care about the sneezer at all and wished they would die. Apparently the germ of this idea comes from a speech by a female character in Reality Bites. I've never seen that movie, but I can assure you I hate it.

You've got to love the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Okay, so their mission isn't quite as critical as that of the volunteers who provide legal advice to arrested protesters, or fight to keep our science classrooms reality-based. But it's still nice to know that somebody's poised to save fourteen year-old music lovers from the predations of the content industry.

They've been doing a particularly great job lately. I wrote about the EFF-sponsored Tor Project previously -- to recap, it's a network of proxies designed to allow easy anonymous communication over the internet. I expressed some worries about it initially, but it turns out that Tor is better than I thought. By default you don't route other people's traffic -- I don't know if this will work very well if the project becomes popular, but for now it means that you can use the system without worrying about getting subpoenaed for other folks' network use. And it's easy to install -- even on Linux. Once you've got it running it works as a SOCKS proxy, meaning that you can easily point a vast array of applications at it and it'll Just Work. The Azureus BitTorrent client seems especially well-suited to Tor-ifying, having settings for a SOCKS proxy (and being written in java, it'll run on any platform). To anonymize your web browsing you'll have to jump through a few more hoops, but all in all it's pretty seamless. Azureus loses a bit of speed (and compatibility with ratio-enforcing trackers), but it's nice to be able to run a worry-free BT client.

So the EFF is doing a great job technically -- but it's also making some slick PR moves. Check out their just-published List of Endangered Gizmos. Is that great or what? It provides a simple, concrete way for people to understand the current battles in the war over Digital Rights Management, and couches the EFF position in a sympathetic spotted-owlish metaphor. Okay, so it may not be 100% accurate -- outlawing digital/analog converters isn't very realistic, although their inclusion on the list makes a good symbolic point about the "analog hole". But it's a nice, press-release-ready way to get people's attention. Keep it up, guys.